The Better Mother (9 page)

Danny doesn’t know what has happened. Now he sees his father coming toward him with something close to a smile, an expression that moves underneath the skin as if surprise and happiness and eagerness are fighting to break the surface. He wonders if it pains him, this almost-smiling, if those long-unused muscles are growing sore from the effort. This is the first time Danny has come to the shop since he was a teenager and he fidgets, his fingers rubbing at the lining in his pockets.

“Hi Dad,” he says, wincing at the echo of his voice against the high ceiling.

“Danny, you didn’t tell me you were coming! You should have said something at dinner. But it’s okay. I can close up for an hour and we can go for coffee.”

All at once, Danny knows that Doug thinks this is the real homecoming: the son returning to his father’s business. He can see Doug’s thoughts floating between them.
He’ll take over the store. He’s come back unexpectedly because he really wants to be here
.

“I need some parasols for a wedding. The woman getting married wants her bridesmaids to carry them instead of flowers. I told her I could get them from you.”

“Sure, sure. We have lots of those. But you can stay for a while, right?”

He can’t look at his father anymore, standing like that, eyes wide open like it’s Christmas. He turns his head and looks out the window at the insurance company’s neon sign across the street.

“No, I have to take off. Another time?”

Doug nods, his face falling back into its familiar lines of grump and irritation, and leads his son into the backroom, where the best stock, untouched by customers, sits wrapped in plastic. As he hands Danny parasol after parasol, he keeps silent, shaking his head whenever they hear the scratching of mice in the walls. Danny could stay, could even share a doughnut and some coffee at the café down the street, but he feels the hairs on his arms stiffen and the muscles in his face tighten at the smell of damp in the walls, the sounds of haggling old women coming in through the open, barred window. He is afraid to look up at the shelves of miniature buddhas for fear that they know exactly what he’s thinking and frown to show their disapproval.

On the corner table, beside the big roll of brown wrapping paper, Danny sees a pile of posters. He peers at them through the fluorescent light.

“Dad, what are those?”

Doug turns his head and grunts. “Those? A bunch of junky old movie posters. Uncle Kwan bought that whole stack in California the last time he went golfing. Said he thought they would be good sellers here, said all the kids are buying up garbage like that for their apartments. I don’t even know how much to charge for them. Ah, they won’t sell anyway.”

Danny walks over to the table and begins to pick his way through the stack. “You’ve got
All About Eve
and
Some Like It Hot
here. These will sell for sure.”

“You wait. All the good ones are on top.”

Danny riffles through the pile, stopping at famous movies or obscure ones with funny titles. One poster from the
middle stops him, a poster bordered with a stripe of bright poppy red. A young woman, all legs and tightly curled blond hair, hides behind a giant fan of feathers, coyly puckering her shiny lips. On her feet, glittering silver shoes.

“The
Dream Girl,”
Danny reads. “A farm girl from America’s Heartland, yearning to be a Broadway star, is forced to become an exotic dancer, bumping and grinding her way through New York City’s raciest clubs. Will she escape this degenerate life, dignity intact? Or will she be eaten alive by drink, fast men and faster cars? Featuring newcomer Lily Jansen and a special appearance by none other than the infamous, bodacious
SIAMESE KITTEN.”

Danny stares. There, in a corner of the poster, is a small illustration of Miss Val herself, a cigarette held to her lips with one black-gloved hand. Her eyes are narrowed at the blond actress, as if she is wondering how a rookie like this managed to land top billing. The smoke winds around her forehead and hair. He traces his fingers over the line of her cheek, feels the thin paper wrinkling. He feels like he did when he was a little boy and stumbled on the Siamese Kitten in that dark, narrow alley. His chest is full with air and the staccato beating of his heart. He doesn’t know what this discovery means and he is restless with the need to snatch the poster and hold it to his face so he can scrutinize every dot of colour, every oversized letter.

He hears his father’s voice at his left ear. “You see? All these movies no one ever heard of.”

Danny turns around, rolling the poster up into a long tube. “I have to go, Dad. How much for the parasols and the poster?”

“You want that? What for?”

“I like it, that’s all,” Danny stammers. He reaches into his pocket for his wallet. “Seriously, how much?”

Doug waves his hand and looks away. “Nothing. Free.”

“Are you sure? You don’t want anything?”

His father starts to walk toward the front of the shop. “You come for dinner again and be nice to your mother. That’s what I want.”

The film flickers, travelling from one reel to the next. It’s a small room in the library, with a screen that the librarian pulled down from the ceiling before she left Danny alone. One after the other, frames whirl by. The eye can, barely, distinguish one still from another, those frozen images of surprise, heartbreak, desire. One strong blink and all these disparate parts become a movie.

The plot is simple. Lily moves from Iowa to New York, stepping into Grand Central Station with two brown suitcases and a small purse slung over her shoulder. She is lit from above and her fine blond hair is almost white; not one shadow obscures her smooth, pale face. She looks for work, walking from theatre to theatre in her red plaid coat and blue beret, at first hopeful, then desperate and begging. A musical director promises her a part, his moustache twitching as the camera lingers on his thin, pointed face. Later, as she lies in his bed, sheets twisted around her breasts and the curve of her hips, he mocks her.

“You’re good for one thing only and it ain’t Broadway.” He sneers as she struggles not to cry, her lips trembling, full like a child’s.

She wanders the streets alone in the rain, shivering, her small umbrella poor protection against the sheets of water falling on the set all around her. The rain is lit like another actor; lights glint off its surface; it shimmers and dances as it bounces off Lily’s umbrella, the newspaper box she is walking past. And then, a warm neon light. She enters a shabby theatre with hundreds of seats. Near-naked girls teasing the crowd with peek-a-boo fans. Lily is shocked by the expanses of skin and the hooting men in the audience, but she is also hungry and tired, and she asks for a job. The manager brings her back stage, where an experienced stripper, the best in the business, looks with disdain at the young, nubile girl she is supposed to turn into a star.

In the movie, this woman is called Jade, but there’s no mistaking her: this is Miss Val. Her black wig. Those red, red lips. Her costume, green and black.

She cannot act, this is clear. Her voice is too strident for film and distorts the sound, like a microphone turned in on itself. She holds her head tilted up, so that her nose seems enormous, and the lights cast deep shadows in the hollows of her cheeks, under her stiff and jutted chin. She delivers her lines with the same emotion every time: a mixture of contempt and sarcasm.

And yet she fills the screen with her presence, dwarfs the other actors around her. Their lines are barely heard, their faces barely noticed. Lily is nothing more than a simpering child compared with Miss Val. She is scared of this older woman, of the words she could utter if there were no script to follow.

Miss Val’s scenes are few, and she performs one striptease, an elaborate number that is the first burlesque dance
Lily ever watches. She begins with her back to the audience, her tall body covered with a red and gold robe. When the first notes of her song begin with what sounds like a pan flute, she turns her head slowly. Miss Val wears a veil suspended from a fearsomely bejewelled headdress that bobs as she nods to the camera. The music picks up speed, and she twirls and pulls open her robe, revealing the bustier underneath. She extends one fishnet-covered leg slowly until it seems impossibly long. As she continues to dance, her face remains hidden for two full minutes until she rips the veil off, her nails like talons, pulling at the fabric. She smiles, and purrs like a cat. She doesn’t sing. Instead, she talks in her halting, fake accent while peeling off her costume.

“I am your Chinese princess for tonight.”

“I love to dance.”

“My heart is broken. Maybe you can fix it?”

On film, the act is brash and loud. Miss Val is so brightly lit and filmed so close up that the texture of her foundation is visible, lightly crinkled, like the side of a nubuck shoe. She wiggles, holds up a painted bamboo fan to cover her G-stringed bottom and tasselled breasts. The camera is her audience and she tries to play to it, looking over her bare shoulder, staring straight into the lens as she runs her fingers over her stockings. It’s easy to feel embarrassment, for it is clear that the Siamese Kitten’s charms—her archness, the fluidity of her movements, the fluttering of her eyelids—are best viewed onstage, when her scent wafts through a theatre, when she looks directly at the loneliest man in the joint.

Later, Lily becomes more famous than Jade, and refuses to help her even when Jade is old and has lost all her money
paying the debts of a gambling, drinking ex-husband. Lily grows hard and mean and her makeup becomes harsher, with sharp liquid eyeliner and overdrawn pink lips.

“I don’t need anyone,” she says when a nervous, hapless salesman asks her to marry him. “Not you, not my family. No one.”

It is only when she discovers Jade dying in a grungy apartment—her unkempt brown hair spread out on the pillow beneath her, her hands trembling as they clutch the blanket—that she leaves the circuit forever. Jade takes one look at Lily’s motionless hair and high, painted eyebrows, and stage-whispers, “You’ll never be happy unless you let someone love you, Missy. See what’s happened to me? It’s sad, but at least I had a man once who loved me because of who I really was, and not who I was onstage.”

Lily returns to her penthouse apartment and packs all of her glittery, expensive clothes in boxes and drives them to a homeless shelter where the bedraggled women stare, open-mouthed, at the evening gowns and high heels she pulls out to show them. In the last scene, Lily walks through Grand Central Station again, carrying those same two brown suitcases, and looks behind her once, her gaze travelling past the camera to something the viewer cannot see, before boarding a train bound for her hometown.

But the movie is really all about Miss Val, and everyone can see that. Who cares about her overacting, her large hands that flutter dramatically against her chest? It is Miss Val who sucks in all the light, who stamps her almost-real self on this strip of moving film.

—

Danny clutches the arms of his plastic chair. Behind him, the full reel of the projector is still spinning, the ends of the roll flapping in the airless room. In front, a blank square of light flashes on the screen. He can hear the noises of the library through the door—shuffling shoes, opening and closing filing cabinets and card catalogues. When he exits, clutching the film to his chest, the light forces itself in through his eyes and fills his head. He stumbles backward until he is leaning against a wall.

His younger self whispers,
Remember when you met her? Remember how she gave you those cigarettes and patted you on the head? There’s no woman in the whole world like Miss Val. You looked for her once, maybe you’ll find her this time
.

Now that his past has come to life, there is no shutting it out. He rubs his ear, but the voice is still there. One week ago, he would have silenced his old self immediately. But as he walks to the librarian’s desk, he thinks of his return to his parents’ house, Miss Val’s belt, and the old curio shop whose unchanging, musty smell snaked through his childhood. Danny the child has emerged, newly feral and disobedient, determined to take down what the grown-up Danny thought was his previously fetterless, adult existence—lovers, clubs and all. That was the life he loved, one that he purposely created, conveniently carving off whatever parts of his past he didn’t need. He looks at his reflection in the floor-to-ceiling window, expecting to see a little boy with uncombed hair and a rip in the knees of his jeans staring back at him. But he is relieved when he sees a transparent, pale version of himself, exactly as he remembers from this morning, with his short-sleeved shirt neatly tucked into his pants, his white tennis shoes spotless as always.

By the time he reaches the librarian’s desk, he is able to smile.

“Thanks for all your help,” he says.

“Oh, you’re welcome. It’s not often that someone asks for something out of the ordinary.” She fiddles with a pen and looks up at Danny’s face.

He’s not sure how to end this conversation, so says, “I like your earrings. They warm up your face.”

The librarian blushes and looks down at her desk. She tugs on her left earring before tilting her head to the side and saying, “Is there anything else you need?”

“Do you have any books or old magazines on burlesque here?”

“That movie is all we have, but I wonder if you might find something in the archives at the public radio station. It’s worth a look if you have the time. The person you want to talk to is Jerry.”

Danny nods and thanks her again. Even as he steps out into the street he can see the planes of Miss Val’s face, the sharpness of her cheekbones and the square tip of her chin. Her eyelashes fluttered to the rhythm of her words. In the heat, the library’s chill evaporates. Men and women walk past him on the sidewalk and their faces seem to bear the features of more familiar people. His parents. Edwin’s grandmother. Cindy as a little girl. Frank. And, most of all, Miss Val.

When Cindy picks up the phone, Danny realizes that he has one thing to ask her. There is no way of padding his question in a different sort of conversation, one that is casual, that touches on the weather, or each other’s workout regimens. But
if he doesn’t ask, he will be caught in a circle of worry and his own monologue, one that will rise and fall and whisper words like
mistake, forget, he was never yours to keep
. It’s not just his childhood that is breaking up the surface. Other, more recent pasts have made their way through the veneer.